Harlan Coben Quotes

Man plans. God laughs.

The actual writing time is a lot shorter than the thinking time. I don't do too many notes. I keep it mostly in my head. I usually start writing a new book around January, and it's due October 1.

There's always a price you pay when you lie. Once you introduce a lie into a relationship, even for the best of intentions, it is always there. Whenever you’re with that person again, that lie is in the room too. It sits on your shoulder. Good lie or bad lie, it's in the room with you forever now. It's your constant companion.

My house has too many distractions. There's the email. There's checking my Amazon ranking. I know I'm the only author who's ever done that, ever. There's the fax. Too many distractions. I like to go out and write.

Frankly I'm fairly boring or fairly busy. Between writing and family, I have little time for anything else.

In short, the satisfaction of creating, not necessarily the process, always lifts my heart.

You can't have an up without a down, a right without a left, a back without a front - or a happy without a sad.

The preparation for building a series of thrillers based on a single character is kind of like the preparation for becoming a parent: The best part is the idea - wink, wink.

I'm the Jerry Lewis of crime fiction.

I'm a little bit of a control freak.

I wrote seven Myron Bolitar novels in a row, and I never want to write a Myron book where he just solves a crime. Every one of them I want to be personal, and I want him to grow and change. The problem with that is, it makes the series limited, you can't write a series where a guy is always going through some kind of crisis.

A trial is two narratives competing for your attention.

William Goldman's Marathon Man was a novel that taught me about suspense. I was maybe 16 years old when I read it and I remember thinking, "You could put a gun to my head and I wouldn't put this book down." I loved that feeling - and want to give it others.

We're called New Jersey but we're actually the suburbs of New York.

Hope is cruel. Hope reminds me of what almost was. Hope makes the physical ache return.

Writers always say, 'I always knew I wanted to be a writer; when I was a three-month-old foetus a pen formed in my hand and I began to scratch my first story on the inside of my mother's womb.' I started later, in my early twenties.

I've never chased the dollar, I've always chased the reader's heart. I love having more readers. The more people who read it, the more thrilled I am.

I love stories. When I'm writing, what I pretend subconsciously is that we're cavemen, we're sitting around the fire, and I'm telling you stories. If I bore you, you're probably going to pick up a big club and hit me over the head.

I'm also inspired by anything that I consider great. It makes me want to raise my game too - Hitchcock movies, Hopper paintings, Springsteen concerts.

Sure, on a larger scale, it was healthy to have people out there you cared about more than yourself. She knew that. But then there was the abject fear you would lose it. They say possessions own you. Not so. Loved ones own you. You are forever held hostage once you care so much.

That's what a good crime novelist - any good novelist - should do with you: play with your perceptions while showing you everything in plain sight.

Kate Atkinson is an absolute must-read. I love everything she writes.

This was a place where tattoos outnumbered teeth.

If I had, say, a tall, amateur male lead living on the campus of a rural college (Six Years), the next book might feature a short, cop who lives in the heart of Manhattan (Missing You).

Painful memories didn't just ease back in-they shoved the door open hard, all of them and all at once

An hour before his world exploded like a ripe tomato under a stiletto heel, Myron bit into a fresh pastry that tasted suspiciously like urinal cake.

..."better to have loved and lost" bullshit. Don't show me paradise and then burn it down.

Memories, you see, hurt. The good ones most of all.

But sometimes, maybe most times, it isn't that clear. It is dark and you are near the edge of a cliff, but you're moving slowly, not sure which direction you're heading in. Your steps are tentative but they are still blind in the night. You don't realize how close you are to the edge, how the soft earth could give away, how you could just slip a bit and suddenly plunge into the dark.

I'd never had money growing up, and it's never been that important to me, except maybe to take our kids on a nice vacation or something like that.

This is the price you pay for having a great father. You get the wonder, the joy, the tender moments - and you get the tears at the end, too.

I'm thinking of taking up golf, but the idea of spending time with golfers frightens me.

I don't find any real rivalries with crime and thriller writers anyway. That might sound a little Pollyanna, but for the most part the writers I compete with, if you want to use that word, it's a pretty friendly rivalry. I think we all realise that the boat rises and sinks together.

I wish i could tell you that through the tragedy i mined some undiscovered, life-altering absolute that i could pass on to you.I didn't.The cliches apply-people are what count,life is precious,materialism is over rated, and the little things matter,live in the moment-and i can repeat them to you ad nauseam.you might listen, but you won't internalize.Tragedy hammers it hm.Tragedy etches into your soul.You might not be happier.But you will be better.

It was one lesson he never forgot.You don't sit back when you or a loved one is being assaulted.And you don't act like the goverment with their "proportional responses" and all that nonsense.If someone hurts you,mercy and pity must be put aside,You eliminate the enemy.You scorch the earth.

The book I always say that influenced me, subconsciously, because at the time I didn't know I wanted to be a writer, was William Goldman's 'Marathon Man.' That was the first adult thriller that I loved. I read it when I was 15 or so, when my father gave it to me.

I pretty much only wear Lilly Pulitzer ties because my best friend owns the company.

I would never write a memoir, because it would be too boring.

Getting into a fight with a popular senior. Pissing off a school teacher and the local chief of police. Hanging with two major-league losers." She slapped my back. "Welcome to high school.

Part of the human condition is that we all think that we are uniquely complex while everyone else is somewhat simpler to read. That is not true, of course. We all have our own dreams and hopes and wants and lust and heartaches. We all have our own brand of crazy

I would rather raise certain topics and maybe let you ruminate on them. I'm not big on answering them.

What I want to do is tell stories about normal people in the American suburbs. I don't write the book where it's a conspiracy reaching the prime minister; I don't write the book with the big serial killer who lops off heads. My setting is a very placid pool of suburbia, family life. And within that I can make pretty big splashes.

Summer romances cometo an end. That was part of the deal. They are built like certain plants or insects, not able to survive more than one season. I thought we would be different. We were, I guess, but not in the way I thought. I truly believed that we would never let each other go. The young are so dumb.

No, I don’t live in heartache. I don’t cry myself to sleep or any of that. I am, I tell myself, over it. But I do feel a void, icky as that sounds. And—like it or not—I still think about her every single day.

Writing a novel in general is like trying to reach a mountain top you'll never quite reach - so you try again and maybe get a little closer.

The readers are the ones who let us live our dreams. I try to write books which are really compelling - that you'd take on vacation and rather than going out, you'd read in your hotel room because you had to find out what happened. Hopefully that's what readers are responding to.

When I was seventeen, I worked as a counsellor at a co-ed sleep-away camp for eight weeks. I loved it but it could be harrowing - it was far too much responsibility for someone my age.

Years fly by, but the heart stays in the same place.